DailyDirt: The Unquestioned Benefits Of Chocolate

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

In a few days, a lot of chocolate will be eaten by kids (and maybe their parents), and there will also be a lot of discounted candy and chocolate on sale in many grocery stores. Just so that we don't feel too bad about indulging on Halloween treats, here are a few studies that might ease our guilt for a while.

Re: Fat vs sugar

Cocoa beans are loaded with things that are good for you included saturated and monounsaturated fats. What's bad for you is all the sugar (carbs) they add to cover its bitter taste. You should only eat chocolate that's 70% or higher cocoa.

chocolate and slavery

Although I love dark chocolate and think there may be a health benefit, I have recently stopped buying chocolate that isn't certified as Free Trade, since the African chocolate industry still has a substantial problem with both slavery of children and harmful child labor practices.

Cripes Techdirt do you even read this stuff before you link it? The first link specifically says that this was a study designed to demonstrate the *fallibility* of common statistical methods in science. The conclusion that more chocoloate equals more Nobel prizes was intended to so absurd as to demonstrate to the flaws in the methodology. And here you are publishing it as fact and unwittingly proving the scientist's point. LOL!

Re:

Laroquod,

"This study brought to you by the Correlation Is Not Causation Foundation." -- That sentence was my way of saying this study was specifically designed to demonstrate that statistics are misinterpreted....

You can try to find correlations between almost any two variables, but it doesn't mean there's any kind of causation relationship between them.... and there's definitely no causation relationship between chocolate consumption and winning a Nobel prize.

Re: Re:

You made an oblique reference to the actual point of the study, but you still trumpeted its conclusions, when the whole point of the study was for you NOT to trumpet its conclusions. The point of the study was to produce such an ABSURD result that it would be impossible for the media to trumpet that conclusion. The scientist who did the study expected it to be so ridiculous that chocolate produces Nobel winners, that it would clearly spark a discussion about correlation and causation. But you (and the source article) instead portrayed the conclusion as non-absurd, and relegated the correlation lesson to a footnote.

I hope that you can see how completely backwards and wrong it is, what you have done here.